Mid-season Drafts

Well here we are again, very near half way through the season and time to start thinking about your mid-season draft.

The mid-season draft is an optional feature of TheBench that many of our competitions choose to run. It adds a great extra dimension to your competition and gives those who find themselves somewhat more challenged in the winners circle department, something to look forward to rather than resigning themselves to a season of bottom dwelling misery.

How it works

How does it work? Well I’m glad you asked. It is all very simple and works very much the same as your pre-season draft. All the coaches in your competition simply drop their duds, the competition manager starts the mid-season draft, each coach takes it in turn to draft new players and before you know it your squads are full again, the mid-season draft ends and you are ready for the next round.

Getting set-up

As the Competition Manager, you need to decide how you want to govern the mid-season draft. Some competitions make it optional to drop players while others enforce a rule for all coaches to de-list a fixed number of players before the mid-season draft is started. It is up to you and you will need to co-ordinate with your coaches to make sure they comply.

If you have set up zero squad changes during the season, you will need to temporarily increase the “Max Squad Changes” parameter on the League Edit page. This will effect all Competitions in your League so you will want to co-ordinate if you are running a multiple Competition League.

Just remember that the more players you drop, the better the quality of pool will be to draft from. If your coaches are only delisting a couple of players, you will find that the mid-season draft doesn’t make much difference as you are just moving around the duds.

The draft order is controlled the same as the pre-season draft, that is, as the Competition Manager you can edit the draft order on the Competition Manager page. Some competitions leave the original order the same while others choose to make the order is reverse ladder order so give the bottom dwellers the first a chance to even things up.

As with the pre-season draft, you have the option to turn on the draft pick timer and for coaches to setup their preferences in advance to keep the draft moving along. When you Competition Manager starts the mid-season draft, all previous draft preferences will be blown away so you don’t end up with drafting players with preferences from your pre-season draft.

To start the mid-season draft, the Competition Manager simply needs to click the “Start Mid-season Draft” link on the Competition Edit page.

Once enabled, coaches will be able to access the Draft Manager page from the top menu and will be able to enter their preferences and picks on the Home page.

The draft will continue until all Squads are full. If a particular Club fills their squad before the others (eg. if the didn’t drop as many players), their turn in the draft will be simply skipped.

You can follow the progress of the draft on the draft log tab on the Draft Manager page.